January 5, 2008: Although we are drifting, the ship’s movement is often invisible to the human eye. But sometimes fissures form in the pack ice and it’s like following the lines on the palm of a hand to tell the future. I’ve been lighting up these fissures with our headlamps, like highways illuminating the future, the possible points where the ice might weaken and we could be set free.

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A fissure in the ice is illuminated by an improbable light disappearing towards a star–but one cannot tell if it is the sun or the moon; a sailboat without sails saved from being devoured by the polar night by the whiteness of a groove in the darkness. The fissure becomes a line of flight, a line of chance, an uncertain axe of unfathomable depth, which guides the eyes towards the unknown, crossing a temporality as fleeting as it is indescribable.